New Spanish Service Lets People Buy Bitcoin At 3,000 Local Stores

People who live in Spain will now have a new option to buy bitcoins locally, with ease.

A service called Coinay has been launched in 3,000 Spanish stores allowing people to go and spend cash for bitcoins, without all the fuss.

In essence, the buyer purchases a voucher and then redeems the voucher for bitcoins. As with any product, consumers will still need a reason to buy it. Consumers buy other vouchers because they have a need of them, such as a Facebook credit voucher or a prepaid debit card.

“With Coinay, we can enable customers to buy easily bitcoins in retail locations all over Spain. Using vouchers makes buying bitcoin fast, easy and convenient for customers,” said Paolo Premoli, Head of Sales South Europe, in a press release.

The vouchers can be bought in amounts of 10 Euros to 100 Euros. Unfortunately for those that want to make bigger purchases, the most a single customer can currently buy at this time is 100 Euros. It is unclear whether the same customer would be allowed to go to other stores and buy bitcoins or not, but it would seem that the company would want to sell more, not less, bitcoins.

In any case, such services take much of the complication out of buying bitcoins. The user simply has to buy the voucher and enter a wallet address, and they receive their money. This could be considered an improvement over the previous learning curve a user would have to go through to understand Bitcoin acquisition. Trading and even buying bitcoins online can be very complicated processes.

Coinay isn’t stuck on Spain, though. They want to take their mission to other parts of Europe, and even to Africa and Latin America later on so that they can sell bitcoins worldwide, instead of just in Spain. Spain will make a rather good test case, as some say it will follow in the footsteps of Greece, depending on how things go in Greece.